IN LOVING HIM
HALLOWEEN. IT HAD BEEN A bad day, I don’t know why. At seven I got up from whatever I was or wasn’t doing, ringed my eyes in kohl, put on a black dress covered in small black sequins, drank down a glass of bourbon and went out into the night, heading for the parade in the West Village. Cold smoky dark, walking past the big brownstones, their stoops and sills covered in a garish litter of pumpkins, skulls and spun white spider webs. I thought it would be cheering to stand in a crowd, but it wasn’t, not really. Looking at my photos from that night I think that what I was in search of was a sensation of smear, of the collapsing boundaries that come with festivity or intoxication. All my pictures are blurred; they all show a whirl of bright objects colliding in space. Giant skeletons, giant eyeballs on stalks, a dozen flashbulbs, a glowing silver suit. A flatbed truck came chugging up Sixth Avenue, bearing a cotillion of zombies snapping and twitching in unison to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.
All that evening, I was dogged by the exhausting sense of being too visible, sticking out like a sore thumb among the coupled and conjoined, the jaunty, tipsy groups of friends. I bitterly regretted not having bought a mask in Party City: a cat face or Spider-Man. I wanted to be anonymous, to pass through the city unseen; not invisible exactly, but concealed, my pained, anxious, all too declarative face hidden from view, relieved from the burden of needing to look unconcerned, or worse, appealing.
What is it about masks and loneliness? The obvious answer is that they offer relief from exposure, from the burden of being seen – what is described in the German as Maskenfreiheit, the freedom conveyed by masks. To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love. This is what makes masks so poignant as well as so uncanny, sinister, unnerving. Think of the Phantom of the Opera or the Man in the Iron Mask; or Michael Jackson himself, for that matter, his exquisite face half-concealed by a black or white surgical veil that begs the question of whether he is the victim or perpetrator of his own disfigurement.
Masks amplify the way in which skin is a barrier or wall, acting as a marker of separation, singularity, distance. They are protective, yes, but a masked face is also frightening. What lies behind it? Something monstrous, something awful beyond bearing. We’re known by our faces; they reveal our intentions and betray our emotional weather. All those horror films that feature masked killers – Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs, Halloween – play on a terror of facelessness, of not being able to make an appeal, to speak as we say face to face, mortal to mortal.
These films often also articulate the deforming, dehumanising, monster-making horror our culture considers loneliness to be. Here donning the mask signifies a definitive rejection of the human state, a prelude to wreaking revenge on the community, the mass, the excluding group. (The same message delivered in a lighter envelope week after week on Scooby-Doo: the ghoul’s mask plucked from the villain to reveal the lonely caretaker, the cantankerous isolate who can’t bear those insufferably sunny, agglomerate kids.)
Masks also beg the question of the public self: the set, frozen features of politeness and conformity, behind which real desires writhe and twist. Maintaining a surface, pretending to be someone you are not, living in the closet: these imperatives breed a gangrenous sense of being unknown, of going unregarded. And then of course there are masks as a cover for illegal or deviant activity, and being unmasked, and being surrounded by a masked mob, like the terrifyingly pastoral animal heads worn by the villagers in The Wicker Man, or the zombie army in ‘Thriller’, a video I’d found unwatchably frightening as a child.
Many of these currents circulate through one of the most striking masked images I’ve ever seen, made by an artist who in the 1980s lived a block away from my apartment on East 2nd. It’s a black and white photograph of a man standing outside the 7th Avenue exit of the Times Square subway. He’s wearing a sleeveless denim jacket, a white t-shirt and a paper mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, a life-sized Xerox of the famous portrait on the cover of Illuminations. Behind him a guy with an Afro is jaywalking in a billowing white shirt and flared black pants. The camera has caught him mid-bounce, one shoe still in the air. Both sides of the street are lined with big old-timey cars and cinemas. MOONRAKER is on at the New Amsterdam, AMITYVILLE HORROR at the Harris, while the sign at the Victory, just above Rimbaud’s head, promises in big black letters RATED X.
The picture was taken in 1979, when New York was passing through one of its periodic phases of decline. Rimbaud is standing at the sleazy epicentre of the city: on the Deuce, the old name for that stretch of 42nd Street that runs between 6th and 8th Avenue – standing, in fact, right where Valerie Solanas was arrested eleven years before. The street was wild even then, but by the 1970s New York was on the verge of bankruptcy and Times Square was overrun by violence and crime, a teeming haven for prostitutes, dealers, muggers and pimps. The Beaux Arts theatres – the same places Hopper had celebrated in New York Movie, his famous painting of a uniformed movie attendant slouched against a wall – had been transformed into porn cinemas and cruising grounds, the old economy of covert glances and desirable images growing more explicit, more flagrant by the day.
What better place for Rimbaud, who was drawn to crime and squalor, who spilled his talent liberally and fast, burning through the precincts of nineteenth-century Paris like a comet? He looks entirely at home there, his paper face expressionless, the gutter glinting at his feet. In other images from the series, which is entitled Arthur Rimbaud in New York, he shoots heroin, rides the subway, masturbates in bed, eats in a diner, poses with carcasses at a slaughterhouse and wanders through the wreckage of the Hudson piers, lounging with outstretched arms in front of a wall spray-painted with the words THE SILENCE OF MARCEL DUCHAMP IS OVERRATED.
No matter how large the crowd through which he moves, Rimbaud is always on his own; always unlike the people who surround him. Sometimes he’s looking for sex, or maybe to sell himself, slouching outside the Port Authority bus terminal, where the hustlers go to display their wares. Sometimes he even has companions, like the one of him standing at night with two laughing homeless men, their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, one of them holding a toy pistol, a trashcan fire burning at their feet. All the same, the mask marks him out as separate: a wanderer or voyeur, unable or unwilling to display his real face.
The Rimbaud series was conceived, orchestrated and shot in its entirety by David Wojnarowicz (generally pronounced Wonna-row-vich), a then entirely unknown twenty-four-year-old New Yorker who would in a few years become one of the stars of the East Village art scene, alongside contemporaries like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Nan Goldin and Kiki Smith. His work, which includes paintings, installations, photography, music, films, books and performances, turns on issues of connection and aloneness, focusing in particular on how an individual can survive within an antagonistic society, a society that might plausibly want them dead rather than tolerate their existence. It’s passionately in favour of diversity; acutely aware of how isolating a homogeneous world can be.
The Rimbaud images are often mistaken for self-portraits, but in fact Wojnarowicz stayed behind the camera, using multiple friends and lovers to play the part of mask-wearer. Nonetheless, the work is deeply personal, albeit in a complicated way. The figure of Rimbaud served as a kind of stand-in or proxy for the artist, inserted into places that mattered to David, places where he’d been or which still exerted a power over him. In an interview carried out much later, he talked about the project and its origins, saying: ‘I’ve periodically found myself in situations that felt desperate and, in those moments, I’d feel that I needed to make certain things . . . I had Rimbaud come through a vague biographical outline of what my past had been – the places I had hung out in as a kid, the places I starved in or haunted on some level.’
He wasn’t kidding about the desperate situations. Violence ran through his childhood like a fire, gutting and hollowing, leaving its mark. The story of Wojnarowicz’s life is emphatically a story about masks: why you might need them, why you might mistrust them, why they might be necessary for survival; also toxic, also unbearable.
He was born on 14 September 1954 in Red Bank, New Jersey. His first memory wasn’t of humans at all, but of horseshoe crabs crawling in the sand, the sort of image his dreamy, collaged films are filled with. His mother was very young, and his father was a merchant seaman, an alcoholic with a vicious temper. The marriage ran into trouble almost as soon as it began, and when David was two years old Ed and Dolores got divorced. For a while he and his siblings – a brother and sister, both older – were left in a boarding house, where they were physically abused: beaten; made to stand to attention or woken in the night and forced to take cold showers. Their mother had custody, but when David was around four the children were kidnapped by their father, who left them on a chicken farm run by an aunt and uncle before taking them to live with his new wife in the suburbs of New Jersey, in what David later described as The Universe of the Neatly Clipped Lawn – a place where physical and psychic violence against women, gay people and children could be carried out without repercussions.
‘In my home,’ he wrote in his memoir, Close to the Knives, ‘one could not laugh, one could not express boredom, one could not cry, one could not play, one could not explore, one could not engage in any activity that showed development or growth that was independent.’ Ed was away at sea for weeks at a time, but when he was home he terrorised the children. David was beaten with dog leashes and two-by-fours, and once saw his sister being slammed on the sidewalk until brown liquid oozed from her ears, while neighbours pruned their gardens and mowed their lawns.
Fear contaminates everything. He remembered playing chicken with the trucks that came over the hill by his house, remembered being left in a shopping centre with his siblings just before Christmas, walking miles home in the snow with two turtles in a takeout box. Often he’d spend whole days hiding in the woods, looking for bugs and snakes, an activity he never tired of, even as a grown man.
At some point in the early 1960s he was sent to Catholic school and around that time his father became crueller, more uncontrolled. Once he killed and cooked David’s pet rabbit, telling the kids they were eating New York strip. Another time, after a beating, he asked David to play with his penis. When David refused he dropped the subject, though the beating continued. Bad dreams in those days, recurring night images of tidal waves and tornadoes. A better one too, which visited periodically right to the end. In it, he was walking along a dirt road to a pond. He’d dive in, swimming beneath the surface. There was a cave at the bottom, and he’d duck down into it, going deeper and deeper, lungs bursting, until at the last possible moment he’d emerge into a chamber filled with stalactites and stalagmites, luminous in the dark.
In the mid-1960s the Wojnarowicz children found their mother by looking up her name in a Manhattan phone book: Dolores Voyna. They snuck away for a day visit, spending a few hours with her in the Museum of Modern Art. It was there, wandering through the galleries, that David decided to become an artist. More visits were sanctioned, but then out of nowhere Ed decided he was done with the kids he’d fought so hard to get, dumping all three of them on Dolores. It should have been a relief, but her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen was tiny and she was unused to playing the part of mother, especially to three by now deeply troubled children. She didn’t even like them using the word mom, and though she was warm and expressive, it soon transpired that she was also manipulative, erratic and unstable.
New York City: the smell of dog shit and rotting garbage. Rats in the cinema, eating your popcorn. All of a sudden sex was everywhere. Men kept trying to pick David up, kept offering him money. He had a dream about being naked in a stream, ejaculating into water, and after that he said yes to one of the guys, going with him to his apartment on Central Park, though he insisted on travelling separately, by bus. He had sex with the son of one of his mother’s friends and then thought frantically about killing him, almost hysterical with panic about his family finding out and sending him to an asylum, where he’d doubtless be given electric shock therapy. Could it be seen on his face: what he’d done, and worse, how much he’d liked it? It wasn’t a good time to be discovering you were queer, a year or two before the Stonewall riots kicked the gay liberation movement into life. He went to the local library to try and find out what a fag was. The information was limited, distorted, depressing; a litany of sissies and inverts, self-harm and suicide.
By fifteen he was regularly turning ten-dollar tricks in Times Square. He loved the energy of the place, though he barely ever visited without getting shoved around or having his pockets picked. The slam of the city, the assault of neon and electric light, the roiling mass of people, made up of mixed elements: sailors, tourists, cops, hookers, hustlers and dealers. He wandered through the crowds, fascinated; a skinny boy with big teeth and glasses, his ribs sticking out. At the same time he was drawn to quieter, more inward pursuits. He liked to draw, liked going to the movies on his own or wandering round the dioramas in the Natural History Museum; the dusty smell, the long unpopulated corridors.
A funny habit from those days: hanging by his fingers from the window ledge of his bedroom, his whole weight suspended seven storeys above 8th Avenue. Testing out the limits of his body, maybe, or maybe putting himself at risk as a way of overriding bad feelings, giving himself a series of self-administered shocks, ‘testing testing testing how do I control this how much control do I have how much strength do I have’. He was thinking about suicide all the time, thinking about suicide and stealing snakes from pet stores, liberating them in the park. Sometimes he’d ride the bus to New Jersey and wade into lakes fully dressed, the only time he ever washed (later, he remembered his jeans being so dirty that he could see the reflection of his face when he bent over). Feeling everything around him, all the architectural structures – school, home, family – crumbling, falling apart, the scaffolding struck.
Things came to a head at around the age of seventeen, when he was either thrown out or ran away for good from the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Dolores had already kicked out both his siblings, after escalating tension, escalating rows. Now David too was on his own, freefalling out of society, crash-landing, as Valerie Solanas had before him, in the slippery, perilous world of the streets.
Time blurred, getting shifty, no longer signifying in the same way. He was almost starving for one thing, eventually getting so emaciated and filthy that he couldn’t pick up a decent trick, settling instead for men who often beat him up or ripped him off. A walking skeleton, at the mercy of any vicious creep. He was so malnourished his gums poured with blood every time he smoked a cigarette. In Fire in the Belly, Cynthia Carr’s extraordinary Wojnarowicz biography, there’s a story about him ending up in hospital alone, in agony because of his rotting teeth, after persuading Dolores to lend him her Medicaid card. Push it under the door when you’re done, she’d said. She’d be on holiday in Barbados.
He never got enough sleep in those days. Sometimes he’d spend the night on the roof of a building, curled against the heating vents, and in the morning would wake covered in soot, his eyes and mouth and nose filled with a choking black dust. The same boy, that is, who’d written in his diary a few months earlier of how frightened he was to spend a night alone. Stealing clothes, stealing reptiles from pet shops. Staying in halfway houses, or with a group of transvestites down by the Hudson River, drifting with them between welfare hotels and wretched apartments. Sleeping in boiler rooms or abandoned cars. Sometimes he was raped or drugged by the men who offered him money, but others were kind to him, especially a lawyer called Syd, who used to take him home and feed him, just treat him like a regular, lovable human being.
Eventually, in 1973, he managed to prise himself off the streets. His sister offered him a bed in her apartment, and slowly he worked his way back into something closer to a regular existence: a roof over his head, at any rate, even if things like steady work and steady money weren’t exactly easy to secure. In fact, in a covering essay for the book Rimbaud in New York, David’s boyfriend Tom Rauffenbart remembered that when they first met, David, who had by then become a successful artist, didn’t own a real bed and seemed to be subsisting on not much more than coffee and cigarettes. ‘I did what I could to change that,’ he added, ‘but essentially David was a loner. Although he knew many people, he preferred to relate to them one-to-one. Everyone knew a slightly different David.’
You don’t emerge from a childhood like that without baggage, without a sense of toxic burdens, which have to be somehow concealed or carried or otherwise disposed of. First there was the legacy of all that abuse and neglect, the feelings of worthlessness and shame and rage, the sense of difference, of being somehow inferior or marked out. Anger, in particular, and bedded underneath it a deep, maybe unquenchable sense of being unlovable.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was also the shame of having been on the streets at all, the worry that people would know he’d been a hustler, and judge him for it. He found himself plagued throughout his early twenties by an inability to speak, to acknowledge verbally what he’d been through, the experiences that he’d had. ‘There was no way I could relate them to anybody in a room full of people at any party anywhere,’ he told his friend Keith Davis in a taped conversation years later. ‘The sense of carrying experiences on my shoulder, where I could sit there and look at people and realize there was just no frame of reference that was similar to theirs.’ And again in Close to the Knives: ‘I could barely speak when in the company of other people. There was never a point in conversations at work, parties or gatherings when I could reveal what I’d seen.’
This sense of separation, of being profoundly isolated by his past, was intensified by the old anxiety about sexuality. It had been agonising, growing up in a world in which what he desired to do with his body was considered disgusting, tragic, deviant, deranged. He came out properly in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, on a brief stint away from Manhattan. Living openly for the first time as a gay man, he immediately felt happier, freer and healthier than he ever had before. At the same time he realised forcibly the weight of the antagonism stacked against him, the hatred lurking everywhere for a man who loved men and was not ashamed of the fact. ‘My queerness,’ he wrote in a biographical summary titled ‘Dateline’, ‘was a wedge that was slowly separating me from a sick society.’
In Close to the Knives, he recalled how it had felt as a child to hear other kids screaming FAGGOT! at one another, how ‘the sound of it resonated in my shoes, that instant solitude, that breathing glass wall no one else saw’. Reading that sentence made me realise how much of his account reminded me viscerally of scenes from my own life; reminded me, in fact, of the precise sources of my isolation, my sense of difference. Alcoholism, homophobia, the suburbs, the Catholic church. People leaving, people drinking too much, people losing control. I hadn’t experienced anything like the violence of David’s childhood, but I knew what it was like to feel unsafe, to pass through chaotic and frightening scenes; to have to find a way of coping with a simmering sense of fear and rage. My mother was gay, deep in the closet. In the 1980s she was outed and we ended up running away from the village I’d lived in all my life, shuttling between houses on the south coast as her partner’s alcoholism grew more advanced.
This was the era of Section 28, when homophobia was enshrined in Britain’s legislation, let alone in any passing bigot’s mind, when teachers could not legally promote ‘the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. I’d always found straight society isolating and potentially dangerous. When I read that line in Knives I remembered vividly the sick feeling that used to come over me at school when other children talked in their hateful, stupid way about fags and gaylords, compacting and inflaming my already acute sense of being an alien, of standing outside. It wasn’t just about my mother. I can see myself then, skinny and pale, dressed as a boy, completely incapable of handling the social demands of being at a girls’ school, my own sexuality and sense of gender hopelessly out of kilter with the options then on offer. If I was anything, I was a gay boy; in the wrong place, in the wrong body, in the wrong life.
Later, after school, I dropped out altogether, living on protest sites, squatting in semi-derelict buildings in seaside towns. I can remember sleeping in a room of junkies, the backyard filled with ten solid feet of rubbish. Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth. And how do you break out, reclaim your right to difference? One of David’s strongest memories of his street years was periodic nights of rage, in which he and a buddy would get so choked up with hunger and frustration that they’d walk almost the length of Manhattan island, smashing the glass in every phone box that they passed. Sometimes you can change the psychic space, the landscape of the emotions, by carrying out actions in the physical world. I suppose in a way that’s what art is, certainly the near-magical art that Wojnarowicz would soon begin to make, as he turned increasingly from destruction to creation.
This is the context from out of which Rimbaud emerged, the kind of issues with which it struggles. David began taking the photos in the summer of 1979 with a 35mm camera he’d borrowed from a friend. He’d been experimenting previously with images shot at the hip, trying to build up a body of work that would testify to the world in which he’d lived, the experiences he still found it impossible to articulate in speech. He was beginning to understand that art might be a way for him to bear witness, to reveal ‘things I’d always felt pressured to keep hidden’. He wanted to make images that somehow told the truth, that acknowledged the people who were left out of history or otherwise disenfranchised, excluded from the record.
There was something very powerful about going back to his old stamping grounds as an adult and inserting Rimbaud into the landscape of his childhood, having him stand impassively by the painted barrier where David used to lean as a boy, waiting for ageing men to buy his skinny, unkempt body. Another self? A sexy, nerveless simulacrum, toughened by experience. Was it a figure he could enter (as later, in his diary: ‘I want to create a myth that I can one day become’), or a way of retroactively protecting the goofy, vulnerable little boy that he’d once been? Hard to imagine his Rimbaud being raped or forced to do anything against its will.
Either way, he was using the camera to illuminate an underground world, pouring light into the hidden places of the city, the hustling grounds, the locations where a struggling kid could make a buck or scrounge a meal. Taking a photograph is an act of possession, a way of making something visible while simultaneously freezing it in place, locking it in time. But what of the mood of the pictures, the loneliness that rolls off them in waves, radiating from Rimbaud’s uncanny, expressionless figure? It seemed to me that they testified not just to a way of life, but also to the experience of feeling different, cut off, incapable of confessing real feelings: imprisoned, in short, as well as liberated by a mask.
The more I looked at them, the more they tallied with the feelings that David was simultaneously exploring in his diaries (‘I found myself walking the streets alone most times, being home alone, and gradually falling into a state of very little communication, all because of the desire to preserve my own sense of life and living’). They express a sense of isolation, a conflict between the desire to make contact, to reach beyond the prison of the self, and to hide, to walk away, to disappear. Something sad about them, despite the toughness, the raw sexuality; a question not yet resolved. As Tom Rauffenbart put it in his essay at the beginning of the Rimbaud book: ‘Although the Rimbaud mask presents a blank, unchanging face, it seems to always be watching and absorbing sights and experiences. Yet in the end, it remains alone.’
*
I went back to England briefly, and when I returned I began frequenting the Wojnarowicz archive at Fales Library, which is housed inside the big Bobst Library at New York University, right opposite Hopper’s old studio in Washington Square. It was just the right distance for a walk and I took a different route each day, crisscrossing the East Village, sometimes dawdling past the little hidden cemetery on East 2nd and sometimes lingering to read the posters outside La Mama and Joe’s Pub. It was winter now, the sky bright blue, buckets of copper-coloured chrysanthemums outside the bodegas.
At the library I’d show my pass and take the elevator to the third floor, deposit my illegal pens in a locker and borrow a pencil to fill out a request sheet. Series I, Journals. Series VIII, Audio. Series IX, Photographs. Series XIII, Objects. Week by week, I worked my way through all of it, unpacking dozens of boxes of the Halloween masks and dollar toys David loved. A red plastic cowboy. A tin ambulance. A devil doll, a Frankenstein. I leafed through diaries, sometimes dislodging old menus and receipts, and watched scratchy VHS tapes of old summer vacations: David swimming in a lake, repeatedly dunking his face beneath the surface as nets of light broke across his chest.
In the evenings, as I walked home past Plantworks or the old Grace Church on Broadway, my head would be filled with images that had surfaced long ago, in the looking glass of someone else’s mind. A man shooting heroin in an abandoned pier, tumbling out of consciousness, limp and lovely as a Pietà, spit bubbling from his lips. Dreams of fucking. Dreams of horses. Dreams of dying tarantulas. Dreams of snakes.
So much of Wojnarowicz’s life was spent trying to escape solitary confinement of one kind or another, to figure a way out of the prison of the self. There were two things he did, two escape routes that he took, both physical, both risky. Art and sex: the act of making images and the act of making love. Sex is everywhere in David’s work, one of the animating forces of his life. It was central among the things he felt driven to write about and depict, to wrestle free from the silence in which he’d felt entrapped as a boy. At the same time, the act itself was also a way – the best way, maybe – of reaching beyond himself, of expressing his feelings via the secret, taboo language of the body. Just as making art allowed him to communicate his private experience, undoing the paralysing spells of speechlessness, so too sex was a way of making contact, of revealing the wordless, unspeakable things he kept concealed deep inside himself.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the same period in which he was making the Rimbaud images, he went out cruising all the time, looking for what some people would describe as casual sex – anonymous and with strangers – but which David almost always both named and viewed as love-making. He recorded these encounters in his diaries and later in his published writing in graphic detail, in both senses of the word: electrically visual, electrically explicit. He also logged his own responses, charting the subtle landscape of the emotions, the instances of longing or paralysing fear.
Almost every night he went out walking, down to the Brooklyn Promenade or over the abandoned West Side Highway to the Chelsea piers, a place that captured both his erotic and creative imagination for many years. The piers ran along the Hudson from Christopher Street to 14th Street and had been rotting ever since the decline of shipping back in the 1960s. As the commercial lines moved their traffic to Brooklyn and New Jersey, most of the Chelsea piers were closed for business and at least three were virtually destroyed by fires. By the middle of the 1970s, the city could no longer afford either to secure or destroy these immense, decaying buildings. Some were squatted by homeless people, who built camps inside the old goods sheds and baggage halls, and others were adopted by gay men as cruising grounds. It was a landscape of decay, of ruined grandeur reclaimed by a dissident, hedonistic population.
David recounted what he saw and did there with an extraordinary mixture of tenderness and brutality. On the one hand, the place was an outdoor whorehouse, reeking of piss and shit, where people were regularly murdered and where he once encountered a screaming man with blood pouring from his face who said a stranger in a navy windcheater had knifed him in an empty room. On the other hand, it was a world without inhibitions, where people whose sexuality was elsewhere the subject of intense hostility could find an absolute freedom of encounter and where moments of unexpected intimacy sometimes bloomed amongst the rubble.
In his diaries, he described prowling the Beaux-Arts departure halls at night or during storms. They were vast as football fields, their walls damaged by fire, their floors and ceilings full of holes, through which you could see the river moving, sometimes silver and sometimes a sludgy, toxic brown. He’d sit at the end of the pier with a notebook, his feet dangling over the Hudson, watching the rain falling, the giant illuminated Maxwell House coffee cup pouring its drips of scarlet neon over the Jersey shore. Sometimes a man would join him, or he’d follow a figure down passageways and up flights of stairs into rooms carpeted with grass or filled with boxes of abandoned papers, where you could catch the scent of salt rising from the river. ‘So simple,’ he wrote, ‘the appearance of night in a room full of strangers, the maze of hallways wandered as in films, the fracturing of bodies from darkness into light, sounds of plane engines easing into the distance.’
Wandering the piers, David rarely encountered the same men twice, though sometimes he looked for them, half in love with an imagined personality, a mythic being he’d conjured out of an accent or a single word. This was part of the pleasure of cruising, the way it allowed him to be sexual and also to stay separate, to maintain a degree of control.You could be alone in the city, could relish the way ‘the solitude of two persons passing in opposite directions creates a personal seclusion’, knowing that places existed where physical connection was almost assured.
The public nature of what happened on the piers was in itself an antidote to secrecy and shame. He tried to give people a degree of privacy, but there was clearly a two-way dance between voyeurism and exhibitionism going on, part of the pluralistic pleasure of the place. At the same time, the scene invoked his archivist’s instinct for recording, for getting down what he saw in words, preserving what might have seemed even then like a transient, impossible utopia. He took photos, his camera at his hip, and carried a razor in case of attack. It all came so fast, anyway, a hail of images, a lovely scrambling assault to the senses. Two men fucking, so hard that one of them fell to his knees. An upside-down couch, scattered office furniture, the carpet pooling with water at every step. Kissing a French man with brilliant white teeth and then staying up all night to make a black and yellow salamander out of paint and clay, a talismanic beast.
Art and sex, the two things bound together. Sometimes he took a can of spray-paint, and scrawled odd scenes from his imagination on to the crumbling walls: stray dreamlike phrases, some by him and some borrowed from artists he admired. THE SILENCE OF MARCEL DUCHAMP IS OVERRATED: he’d written that, in homage to Beuys, then sprayed a version of the Rimbaud face, roughly outlined on a pane of glass. Lines about a Mexican dogfight, a drawing of a headless figure shooting up. Often he incorporated his graffiti into the background of the Rimbaud photos, building up layers of his presence, inscribing himself into the fabric of the place.
He wasn’t by any means the only person to be inspired by the wreckage of the piers. Artists had been coming there for almost a decade, drawn by the vast scale of the rooms, the freedom of working without scrutiny or supervision. In the early 1970s, there’d been a series of avant-garde happenings, recorded in weirdly beautiful black and white photos. One shows a man suspended from a loading entrance, dangling from a rope tied to his foot. He teeters above a great heap of trash, from which a single Christmas tree protrudes: the Hanged Man in a post-apocalyptic Tarot deck. The same artist, Gordon Matta-Clark, was also responsible for the most ambitious artistic intervention on the piers. For Day’s End, he and a team of helpers carved massive geometric shapes out of the floor and walls and ceiling of Pier 52 with chainsaws and blowtorches, letting in a torrent of light and converting the space into what Matta-Clark described as a sun and water temple, built without consultation or permission.
As for the cruising years, they were also documented by dozens of photographers, some amateur and some professional, among them Alvin Baltrop, Frank Hanlon, Leonard Fink, Allen Tannenbaum, Stanley Stellar and Arthur Tress, as well as Peter Hujar, the man who would become the most stabilising and important figure in David’s life. With their cameras, they captured it for posterity: the crowds of naked sunbathers on the dock; the cavernous rooms with their broken windows and damaged girders; the half-dressed men embracing in the shadows.
Others came to paint. Wandering around Pier 46, exploring the stinking labyrinth, David encountered the graffiti artist Tava, born Gustav von Will, who was working on one of his enormous priapic figures, far larger than life. More of them kept appearing, guardians and witnesses to the embracing bodies below. A faun in sunglasses, fucking a bearded man on all fours. Naked muscled torsos with enormous cocks, which David described as caryatids. Images of sexual freedom, licentiousness and pleasure, shocking in their rawness, though as David pointed out later, what was really shocking was that sexuality and the human body were taboo subjects at this late juncture in time, this ebb-end of a violent, image-saturated century.
*
Reading David’s diaries was like coming up for air after being a long time underwater. There is no substitute for touch, no substitute for love, but reading about someone’s else’s commitment to discovering and admitting their desires was so deeply moving that I sometimes found I was physically shaking as I read. That winter, the piers took on a life of their own in my mind. I pored over all the accounts I could find, fascinated by the spaces, the recklessness of encounter, the freedom and creativity they permitted. They seemed like an ideal world for someone who was struggling with connection, in that they combined the possibilities of privacy, anonymity and personal expression with the ability to reach out, to find a body, to be touched, to have your doings seen. A utopian, anarchic, sexy version of what the city itself offers, but unsanitised, permissive rather than restrictive – and queer of course, not straight.
I knew this was idealistic, only half the story. I’d read plenty of reports that testified to how dangerous the piers were, and how rejecting and brutal they could be if you didn’t look the part or know the code, let alone the bleak consequences that would befall this libidinal haven as AIDS took hold. Still, the piers as they had been gave my mind a place to wander, outside the gleaming factory of monogamy, the pressure to cuddle up, to couple off, to go like Noah’s animals two by two into a permanent container, sealed from the world. As Solanas bitterly remarked: ‘Our society is not a community but merely a collection of isolated family units.’
I didn’t want that any more, if in fact I ever had. I didn’t know what I did want, but maybe what I needed was an expansion of erotic space, an extension of my sense of what might be possible or acceptable. This is what reading about the piers was like: it was like those dreams when you push on the wall of a familiar room in a familiar house, and it gives way, opening on to a garden or a pool you never knew was there. I always woke from those dreams flushed with happiness, and it was the same when I read about the piers, as if each time I thought about them I relinquished a little more of the shame that almost every sexual body bears.
One of the things I was reading alongside Wojnarowicz was The Motion of Light in Water, a radically candid memoir about living in the Lower East Side in the 1960s by the science fiction writer and social critic Samuel Delany. In it, he described his own nights on the waterfront, ‘a space at a libidinal saturation impossible to describe to someone who has not known it. Any number of pornographic filmmakers, gay and straight, have tried to portray something like it – now for homosexuality, now for heterosexuality – and failed because what they were trying to show was wild, abandoned, beyond the edge of control, whereas the actuality of such a situation, with thirty-five, fifty, a hundred all but strangers is hugely ordered, highly social, attentive, silent, and grounded in a certain care, if not community.’
In a later book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, he returns to this thought about community in greater detail. Times Square is a memoir-cum-polemic, in which come is the operative word. It chronicles Delany’s experiences in the Square, and particularly in the porn cinemas of 42nd Street, like the one that appears with its declarative X in the background of the Rimbaud photo. Delany went to these cinemas often daily over a period of thirty years to have sex with multiple strangers, some of whom became deeply familiar to him, though their relationships rarely transcended the location.
Delany was writing in the late 1990s, after the gentrification – the literal Disneyfication, in fact, considering the identity of one of the major investors – of Times Square; which is to say that he was writing in praise and grief at what had already been destroyed. In his thoughtful as well as practised estimation, what had been lost was not just a place to get your rocks off, but also a zone of contact, and particularly of cross-class and cross-racial contact - a site that facilitated intimacy, albeit transient, between a diverse multitude of citizens, some wealthy and some poor, some homeless, some mentally unsettled, but all soothed by the democratic balm of sex.
His take wasn’t so much nostalgic as utopian: a vision of a lubricated city of exchange, in which brief, convivial encounters kept satiated those otherwise nagging and sometimes agonising needs for touch, company, playfulness, eroticism, physical relief. Furthermore, these interactions in stalls and balconies and orchestra pits created as a by-product the kind of weak ties that sociologists believe glue metropolises together, though admittedly they tend to be thinking of repeat encounters with shopkeepers and subway clerks, rather than amiable strangers who might give you a hand job once every three years.
As to whether these places did reduce loneliness, the city itself provided proof of that. Writing of the systemic closures that came in the 1990s, Delany regretfully observed: ‘What has happened to Times Square has already made my life, personally, somewhat more lonely and isolated. I have talked with a dozen men whose sexual outlet, like many of mine, were centered on that neighborhood. It is the same for them. We need contact.’
We do. But there was a glitch in this utopia, at least as far I was concerned. In the context of the cinemas, the piers, citizens meant men, not women. Once, Delany did bring a female friend with him to the Metropolitan: a small Hispanic woman who worked as an office temp, spending her evenings playing guitar and singing in nightclubs in the Village. Ana was curious about the scene and so she joined Delany for an afternoon, dressed in boyish clothes, though that didn’t stop a kid muttering fish as she walked past, or the manager accusing her of being a prostitute. The visit passed off smoothly enough – plenty of easy-going action on the balcony to watch – and yet this anecdote reads more queasily than any of the more graphic encounters elsewhere recorded. What hangs over it, what looms unsaid, is the threat of what could have happened: the potential violence, the all too plausible act of rape, the peculiar mix of disgust, objectification and desire that the female form engenders, particularly when it appears in sexual contexts.
God I was sick of carrying around a woman’s body, or rather everything that attaches to it. Maggie Nelson’s stunning The Art of Cruelty had recently been published and there was a paragraph I’d underscored and ringed in pen, struck by how well it explained my attraction to the world of the piers. ‘Of course,’ she wrote, ‘not all “thingness” is created equal, and one has to live enough of one’s life not as a thing to know the difference.’ In parenthesis, she added: ‘This may explain, in part, why the meat-making of gay male porn doesn’t produce the same species of anxiety as that of straight porn: since men - or white men, at any rate - don’t have the same historical relation to objectification as do women, their meat-making doesn’t immediately threaten to come off as cruel redundancy.’
Sometimes you want to be made meat; I mean to surrender to the body, its hungers, its need for contact, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily want to be served bloody or braised. And at other times, like Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud, you want to cruise, to pass unnoticed, to take your pick of the city’s sights. This was why I’d been so frantic for a mask at the Halloween parade: because I didn’t want to be the thing that was looked at, that could be rejected or disparaged.
I was always walking that winter, up by the Hudson, poking about in the gentrified remnants of the piers, pushing up past the manicured lawns, with their population of glossy couples pushing strollers. Here and there, I found small relics of the past. A set of old wooden pilings, sticking up through the pewter-coloured water like pins from a cushion. Two fallen stone columns, carved with wings. Skinny trees, growing out of rock and rubble, locked gates, layers of graffiti, a poster that read sadly COST WAS HERE.
As I wandered, I kept trying to think of an image of a woman that could act as a counterpart to Rimbaud in New York: an image of a woman at loose in the city, free-wheeling, to borrow a term from Valerie Solanas (who had her own history with the piers and who was through with the whole business, writing with characteristic bitterness: ‘SCUM gets around . . . they’ve seen the whole show – every bit of it – the fucking scene, the dyke scene – they’ve covered the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier – the peter pier, the pussy pier . . . you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex’).
I hadn’t at the time encountered the artist Emily Roysdon’s wry photographs of herself re-enacting the Rimbaud images, her face covered by a paper mask of David Wojnarowicz. Instead, I was looking at pictures of Greta Garbo, those tough dreamy images of her striding around the city in men’s shoes and a man’s trench coat, taking no shit from anyone, out solely for herself. In Grand Hotel, Garbo said she wanted to be alone, that famous line, but what the real Miss Garbo desired was to be left alone, a very different thing: as in unbothered, unwatched, unharried. What she longed for was privacy, the experience of drifting unobserved. The sunglasses, the newspaper over the face, even the string of aliases – Jane Smith, Gussie Berger, Joan Gustafsson, Harriet Brown – were ways of avoiding detection, inhibiting recognition; masks that liberated her from the burden of fame.
For most of the years of her retirement, which began in 1941 at the age of thirty-six and lasted for almost five whole decades, Garbo lived in an apartment in the Campanile building on East 54th Street, not far from the Silver Factory, though considerably more salubrious. Every day she went on two walks: long meandering strolls that might take her up to the Museum of Modern Art or the Waldorf; walks for which she shod herself in tan or chocolate or cream suede Hush Puppies, which I once came across for sale on an internet auction. Often she went all the way to Washington Square and back, a loop of six miles, stopping to gaze in the windows of bookstores and delis, walking aimlessly, walking not as a means but as an end, an ideal occupation in and of itself.
‘When I stopped working, I preferred other activities, many other activities,’ she once said. ‘I would rather be outside walking than to sit inside a theater and watch a picture moving. Walking is my greatest pleasure.’ And again: ‘Often I just go where the man in front of me is going. I couldn’t survive here if I didn’t walk. I couldn’t be 24 hours in this apartment. I get out and look at the human beings.’
This being New York, the human beings tended to ignore her, though Andy Warhol did confess in his diary in 1985 to passing her in the street and being unable to resist following for a while, taking sneaky photos as he went. She was wearing dark glasses and a big coat, her signature accoutrements, and she went into a Trader Horn store to talk to the counterwoman about TVs. ‘Just the kind of thing she would do,’ Warhol reported. ‘So I took pictures of her until I thought she would get mad and then I walked downtown.’ He laughs then, adding ruefully: ‘I was alone, too.’
The internet is full of images of her wandering the city. Garbo with an umbrella. Garbo in camel-coloured slacks. Garbo in an overcoat, her hands behind her back. Garbo drifting along Third Avenue, walking calmly between the cabs. In a copy of Life from 1955, there’s a full-page photograph of her crossing a street, islanded between four lanes of traffic. She cuts a strangely Cubist figure, her head and body completely encased in an enormous black sealskin coat and hat. Only her feet are visible, two skinny legs in blurry boots. She’s turned disdainfully from the camera, her attention caught by a gauzy explosion of light at the end of the avenue, into which the buildings seem to dissolve. ‘A LONELY FORM’, the caption declares: ‘Garbo crosses First Avenue near her New York home on a recent afternoon.’
It’s an image of refusal, of radical self-possession. But where do these pictures come from? Most were taken by Garbo’s stalker, the paparazzo Ted Leyson, who spent the best part of eleven years, from 1979 to 1990, lurking outside her apartment building. He’d hide, he once explained in an interview, and she’d come out of her front door and look around. Once she was certain she was alone, she’d relax, and then he could sneak after her, ducking from doorway to doorway, ready to snap her out of solitude.
In some of these images you can tell that she’s spotted him, whipping a tissue to her mouth to spoil the value of his picture. Candids, they called them, a word that once meant pure, fair, sincere, free from malice. It was Leyson who bagged the final photograph, the last before she died. He shot it through the window of the car that was taking her to hospital, her long silver hair down around her shoulders, one veined hand covering the lower portion of her face. She’s looking at him through tinted glasses, her expression a queasy combination of fear, scorn and resignation; a gaze that should by rights have cracked the lens.
In two separate interviews, Leyson explained his behaviour as an act of love. ‘That’s how I express myself – in a strange way – express my regard and admiration for Miss Garbo. It’s an overwhelming desire on my part, something I cannot control. It became obsessive,’ he told CBS’s Connie Chung in 1990. To Garbo’s biographer Barry Paris he added in 1992: ‘I admire and love her very much. If I caused her any pain, I’m sorry, but I think I did something for her or for posterity. I spent ten years of my life with her — I’m the other “man who shot Garbo”, after Clarence Bull.’
I don’t want to moralise about desire, be it scopophilia or any other kind. I don’t want to moralise about what pleases people or what they do in their private lives, as long as it doesn’t cause harm to others. That said, Leyson’s pictures are symptomatic of a kind of gaze that whether given or withheld is dehumanising, a meat-making of a profoundly unliberating kind.
All women are subject to that gaze, subject to having it applied or withheld. I’d been brought up by lesbians, I hadn’t been indoctrinated in anything, but lately I’d begun to feel almost cowed by its power. If I was to itemise my loneliness, to categorise its component parts, I would have to admit that some of it at least was to do with anxieties around appearance, about being found insufficiently desirable, and that lodged more deeply beneath that was the growing acknowledgement that in addition to never being able to quite escape the expectations of gender, I was not at all comfortable in the gender box to which I’d been assigned.
Was it that the box was too small, with its preposterous expectations of what women are, or was it that I didn’t fit? Fish. I’d never been comfortable with the demands of femininity, had always felt more like a boy, a gay boy, that I inhabited a gender position somewhere between the binaries of male and female, some impossible other, some impossible both. Trans, I was starting to realise, which isn’t to say I was transitioning from one thing to another, but rather that I inhabited a space in the centre, which didn’t exist, except there I was.
That winter, I kept watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film that is all about masks and femininity and sexual desire. If reading about the piers expanded my sense of possibility about sex, then watching Vertigo was a way of repeatedly alerting myself to the danger of conventional gender roles. Its subject is objectification and the way it breeds loneliness, amplifying rather than closing the gap between people, creating a dangerous abyss – the very chasm, in fact, into which James Stewart as police detective Scottie Ferguson finds himself tumbling, knocked off his feet by craving for a woman who even when alive is more enigma or absence than corporeal, sweating presence.
The most disturbing section takes place after Scottie’s breakdown, which itself follows on the heels of his lover Madeleine’s suicide. Wandering the precipitous streets of San Francisco, he happens upon Judy, a chubby brunette in a Kelly green sweater who bears a passing resemblance to his lost love, though she possesses none of Madeleine’s frosty hauteur or her passivity, her near-catatonic withdrawal from life.
In a grim reworking of the transformations effected in My Fair Lady and Pretty Woman, he takes this brash, fleshy, vulgar girl to Ransohoff’s department store and makes her try on suit after suit until he finds the exact replica of Madeleine’s immaculate smokegrey. ‘Scottie, what are you doing?’ Judy says. ‘You’re looking for the suit that she wore, for me. You want me to be dressed like her . . . No, I won’t do it!’ And she runs to the corner of the room and stands there like a child being punished, her head bowed, her hands clasped behind her back, her face turned to the wall. ‘No, I don’t want any clothes, I don’t want anything, I just want to get out of here,’ she whimpers, and he jerks her arm, saying: ‘Judy, do this for me.’ I watched that scene again and again, wanting to drain it of its power. It’s the spectacle of a woman being forced to participate in the perpetual, harrowing, non-consensual beauty pageant of femininity, of being made to confront her status as an object that might or might not be deemed acceptable, capable of arousing the eye.
In the next scene, in a shoe shop, Judy is expressionless. She’s absented herself, withdrawing from that place of siege, her body. Later, Scottie drops her off at a hairdresser and goes home to her hotel, where he fiddles with a newspaper, in a state of agonising impatience. She comes towards him along a corridor, white-blonde now, but with her hair still down around her shoulders. ‘It should be back from your face and pinned back,’ he says furiously. ‘I told them that, I told you that.’ She tries once again to check him and then capitulates, going into the bathroom to complete the final episode of her transformation.
Scottie walks to the window. Outside, behind net curtains, light is leaking from a neon sign, drenching the room with icy green — the Hopper colour, the colour of urban alienation, inimical to human connection; maybe even to human life. Then Judy-as-Madeleine emerges, and walks towards him, a perfect copy of a copy. They kiss and as the camera circles around them she swoons backward until it seems that he’s embracing a dead body, a prefiguration of what will shortly come to pass.
That embrace is one of the loneliest things I’ve ever seen, though it’s hard to tell who’s worse off: the man who can only love a hologram, a figment, or the woman who can only be loved by dressing up as someone else — someone who barely exists at all, who is travelling from the moment we first see her towards death. Never mind meat-making: this is corpse-making, objectification taken to its logical extreme.
*
There are better ways of looking at bodies. One of the best antidotes I found, a corrective to Hitchcock’s necrophilia and Leyson’s stolen images of a beautiful stranger, was the work of the photographer Nan Goldin, one of David Wojnarowicz’s closest friends. In her portraits of friends and lovers, the boundaries between bodies, sexualities, genders seem magically to dissolve. This is especially true of her constantly re-edited work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which she began during the 1970s while living in Boston and continued after her move to New York City in 1978.
These images are almost painfully intimate. ‘The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me,’ Goldin writes in the introduction to the Aperture edition of Ballad. ‘There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.’
It’s striking, the difference between observer and participant. What Goldin’s photographs show are beloved human bodies, some of which she’s known since her teens, regarded with an unaffected tenderness. Many of her images document scenes of decadence – the wild and wasted party-going, the drugs, the baroque outfits. Others are quieter, more gentle. Two men kissing. A boy lying in the milky waters of a bath. A woman’s hand on a man’s bare back. A couple in bed, on striped sheets, the paleness of their skin emphasized by the lacy white negligées both are wearing.
Naked flesh is everywhere in Goldin’s work, sometimes bruised or sweating, the near-translucent white of the professionally nocturnal. Bodies sleeping, bodies fucking, bodies embracing, estranged bodies, battered bodies, bodies bent on getting high. Her subjects, identified by first names only, are often half-dressed, stripping out of or climbing into clothes, washing or painting a face on in the mirror. Her work is fascinated by people in the act of transition, passing between one thing and another, adapting and refashioning themselves by way of lipstick, lashes, gold lamé, piles of teased hair.
Goldin has explicitly said that she doesn’t believe in a single, revelatory portrait of a person, but aims instead to capture a swirl of identities over time. Her people pass through moods, outfits, lovers, states of intoxication. Forget the clunky opposition between masked and authentic selves. Instead there’s fluidity, perpetual transition. Many of her subjects, especially early on, were drag queens. She captures the process of transformation, the beautiful boys turning themselves into what she once described as a ‘third gender, that made more sense than either of the other two’. Sexual desire is likewise fluid, a matter of connection rather than category. A relief, this non-binary domain, where playing with appearance doesn’t automatically necessitate Vertigo’s toxic self-extinguishment, but is instead an act of discovery and expression.
That isn’t to say that the portraits shy away from showing failures of intimacy: glitches and hiccups, moments of ambivalence or unravelling ties. The subject of Ballad is explicitly sexual relationships. As a body of work it traverses the poles of connection and isolation, capturing people as they drift together and apart; moving on the unsteady tides of love. Some sequences – ‘Lonely Boys’, maybe, or ‘Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues’ or ‘Casta Diva’ — show individuals in states of solitude and longing, lounging on beds or gazing through windows, that classic Hopperesque image of the person in a state of paucity and enclosure. The beautiful Dieter with the tulips, its powdery grey light, the papery striped flowers, the softness of his face. Tough Sharon, hand thrust into the waistband of her blue jeans, a little square of plaster stuck on to her jaw. Or Brian, lying on the middle one of three double beds in a dingy, barely furnished hotel room in Merida, Mexico, 1982.
Others plunge to the opposite extreme, showing scenes of contact, even congress. A naked boy and a nearly naked girl kissing on a stained mattress on the floor in a New York apartment, their torsos pressed together, their slender legs entwined, one delicate foot cupped upwards, exposing a filthy sole. Or Nan herself in purple ankle boots and maroon socks, her pale legs bare, straddling her lover’s chest, his hands just grazing the edge of translucent black knickers. The loveliness of touch, the rush of contact, the high of simply embracing, like Bruce and French Chris on a towel scattered with stars on the beach at Fire Island.
But if sex is a cure for isolation, it is also a source of alienation in its own right, capable of igniting precisely the dangerous forces that swept Scottie off his feet in Vertigo. Possessiveness, jealousy, obsession; an inability to tolerate rejection, ambivalence or loss. The most famous image in Ballad is a self-portrait of Goldin after her then-boyfriend battered her so badly that she was almost blinded. Her face is bruised and swollen, smashed around the eyes, the skin discoloured to a ruddy purple. Her right iris is clear but the left is suffused with blood, the same scarlet as her painted lips. She stares into the camera, damaged eye to eye, not so much letting herself be seen as willing herself to look, conducting her own act of remembrance, adding herself to the archive of what goes on between human bodies.
This desire to show what really happened, no matter how shocking, had its roots in childhood experience. Like Wojnarowicz, whom she first met when they were both living in the East Village, Goldin grew up in the suburbs, amidst a climate of silence and denial. When she was eleven, her eighteen-year-old sister killed herself, lying down on a train track outside Washington D.C. ‘I saw the role that her sexuality and its repression played in her destruction,’ she wrote. ‘Because of the times, the early sixties, women who were angry and sexual were frightening, outside the range of acceptable behaviour, beyond control.’
Like Wojnarowicz, she used photography as an act of resistance. In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.’ It wasn’t enough just to take the photos; they also had to be seen, shown back to their subjects. On Twitter, of all places, I’d once come across a handwritten, Xeroxed flier, advertising one of the first of the periodic slideshows she organised of Ballad: 10 p.m. on a May night at 8BC, a club that opened in 1983 in the basement of an old farmhouse, back when the East Village was almost derelict, block after block burned out or converted into shooting galleries.
In 1990, Interview published a conversation between Goldin and Wojnarowicz, one of the wide-ranging, intimate exchanges between artists that Andy Warhol had envisaged when he first dreamt up the magazine, two decades before. It opens with them in a café in the Lower East Side, joking around over the size of their calamari and struck to discover their birthdays are only a day apart. They talk about their work, discussing anger and violence, sexual desire and their shared wish to leave a record.
Close to the Knives had only recently been published, and towards the end of their conversation Goldin asks David what he’d most like his work to achieve. ‘I want to make somebody feel less alienated – that’s the most meaningful thing to me,’ he says. ‘I think part of what informs this book is the pain of having grown up for years and years believing I was from another planet.’ A minute later, he adds, ‘We can all affect each other, by being open enough to make each other feel less alienated.’
This sums up exactly how I felt about his work. It was the rawness and vulnerability of his expression that proved so healing to my own feelings of isolation: the willingness to admit to failure or grief, to let himself be touched, to acknowledge desire, anger, pain, to be emotionally alive. His self-exposure was in itself a cure for loneliness, dissolving the sense of difference that comes when one believes one’s feelings or desires to be uniquely shameful.
In all his writing there is a stepping back and forth between different kinds of material, some very dark and full of disorder, but containing always astonishing spaces of lightness, loveliness, strangeness. He possessed an openness that was in itself beautiful, though he sometimes wondered if he was only capable of reproducing the ugliness he’d seen.
Then too there was his sense of solidarity, his commitment to and interest in people who were different, who stood outside the norm. ‘I always consider myself either anonymous or odd looking,’ he once wrote, ‘and there is an unspoken bond between people in the world that don’t fit in or are not attractive in the general societal sense.’ Almost all the sexual encounters that he records — hundreds, if not more — attest to an extraordinary tenderness towards other people’s bodies and desires, their weirdnesses, the things they want to do. The only time he sounds truly hostile is when coercion or cruelty of some kind is involved.
If I had to pick a single paragraph, it would be this one, from Close to the Knives, about an encounter he had on the pier.
In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.
I loved that statement, loved especially the final line. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life. That’s the dream of sex, isn’t it? That you will be liberated from the prison of the body by the body itself, at long last desired, its strange tongue understood.